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Todd Dills

Highlighting cargo theft

One week after St. Patrick’s Day, on Wednesday my hometown newspaper, the Rock Hill, S.C., Herald, reported that a locked trailer hooked to driver Barry Cousar’s tractor, parked at the Lake Marian Truck Stop on U.S. 21 at I-77, was burglarized. Bandits made off with $28,000 worth of green highlighters, prompting reporter Kimberly Dick to ask the obvious question of the thieves’ intent. Among numerous jokes about marathon fume huffing at the paper’s website, one commenter quipped, “The thief was an avid reader of the Rock Hill Herald and needed to highlight all the grammer [sic] mistakes.”

Driver Cousar noted there were “no markings on the outside of the truck that indicate what’s inside,” Dick wrote. “‘They probably saw the trailer had a lock on it and wanted to see what was inside,’ Cousar said.”

Cargo theft has been on the rise in the past few years, criminal desperation noted as recently as late February in national venue — see this story in USA Today, for instance.

Todd Dills

Todd Dills is Senior Editor of Overdrive magazine and writes from Nashville, Tenn. He frequently covers business, regulatory and lifestyle topics for the magazine and at OverdriveOnline.com. His work on the “CSA’s Data Trail” series in Overdrive about the federal CSA program was awarded the highest honor in trade journalism – the “Grand Neal” – by American Business Media at the 2014 Jesse H. Neal Awards. Dills’ Channel 19 blog covers a grab bag of on-highway hearsay, owner-operator news and driver views from the roadways the nation over. His work in trucking journalism builds on a background of news feature, fiction and other creative writing and editing. Find him here at the Channel 19 blog and via his Twitter feed, or send tips to tdills@randallreilly.com or via phone at 205-907-2481.